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Published: December 2nd 2017
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On the road again...It took about seven and a half hours to drive from Grafton to Lightning Ridge. We travelled along the Gwydir to Collarenebri then headed along dirt road to Lightning Ridge. Arriving in town we chose the Opal Caravan park - it is just out of town and looked the nicest (more open spaces), even though all of the sites are on gravel. After setting up I did some research on tours and things to do in the Ridge. I don't do underground (claustrophobia) so I booked in for the Black Opal town tour the next day. Their town tour has an optional extra (after the down tour) to do the underground mine.
It was very hot so once we were setup and the tour bookings were done we headed to the pool to cool down. We had a late afternoon thunderstorm, but it didn't rain too heavily. The caravan park is on gravel and has excellent camp kitchen facilities, so we spent the rest of the day talking to other travellers and chilling out in the camp kitchen.
The tour started just after 8am the next morning - the bus picked us up from
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Scenery along the road the caravan park. Apparently we are in the low season (high season is in winter - because who wants to go to the outback in Summer) and a lot of the tourist attractions are now closed. The driver of our tour bus was even a fill-in - the 'usual' driver was away for the summer and the 'backup' driver was sick, so we had the managers son. He tried, but wasn't very knowledgeable when it came to historical facts and stories. We did hear a lot about the dishonest miners going into neighbouring mines and stealing opals, and we had the opportunity to noodle in some washed and unwashed piles. And we learnt that Lightning Ridge got it's name because the high iron content in the rocks attracts lightning during storms. Although the tour was a bit ordinary, it was interesting to learn about where and how opals are found. The building codes must be pretty relaxed here too - there are some very dodgy/unusual looking buildings around.
After the tour we had lunch then headed back into town to the visitor info centre. The centre volunteer gave us some maps and explained which attractions were still running (not
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Scenery along the road many) - she was a bit of a character herself and was happy to talk about the old days when she drove the tour bus. We arrived back at the caravan park mid-afternoon, just as it started to rain again. And it bucketed down for hours!
I can't say that Lightning Ridge is a place I would like to live - I found nothing very attractive about the town at all, but I'm glad we visited and stayed a couple of days.
The next day we headed off towards Bourke. We had planned on taking a dirt road, but given the amount of rain we've had we decided to go via Walgett - all bitumen. Not far into our journey we noticed a school bus having some difficulty getting out of the bus stop at the side of the road. He was bogged and had already spent some time trying (unsuccessfully) to get out. So we gave him a tow and got him back on the road. The ground was extremely boggy and sticky - it made us think again about the dirt roads we were heading towards. During breakfast at Walgett I looked up Bourke council and
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Pool in Opal Caravan Park got some information about the road conditions. The roads to Cameron Corner were closed, and were not expected to open for a few days at least - and there was more rain forecast!
We changed our direction and headed to Moree for the night instead. There we would look at our options and choose which way to go. When staying in Moree we normally go to the Gwydir Caravan Park (for the thermal pools) but thought we'd try the new Hot Springs resort this time. It has a nice big pool with islands and water jets. The best thing about it was that it was indoors - it rained all day!
So we made a major decision to go home - we can come back another time to do Cameron Corner (in Autumn or Winter). The rest of the state had heavy rain forecast for the rest of the week too. So we'll go home and wait out the crappy weather then we may do some short local trips before Christmas - but
this is the end of the Hakuna Matata trip.
I will continue to blog about the places we go... So stay tuned for more
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Clouds rolling in... adventures.
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